We at Generation Bubble confess that few things perplex us more than the contemporary cult of fitness. The whole phenomenon strikes us as an exercise (pun intended) in superfluity, if indeed not futility.

The cardio cubicle dweller, the steroidal stock analyst, the iron-man management consultant — each appears a picture of irrelevancy. Muscles taut as bowstrings quiver with every computer keystroke, agitated by the disuse to which the demands of the contemporary workplace condemn them.

There was a time — a time of long hours spent in sweated labor — when a massive, toned body was not only an asset but an inevitable consequence of one’s condition in life. Brown-skinned and clean-limbed the swinkerer turned the contrary earth to earn his daily bread. But what of bodies now? We live at a time when bodies no longer reflect but in fact deny their environments. Or, if they do faithfully reflect their environments, it’s to their owner’s shame and embarrassment. If bodies faithfully reflected their environments, free of shame or censure, we’d live in the reign of the universal fatso. Bleached, bloated, courting diabetes, we’d peck away at our barely taxing tasks secure in knowing our bodies were as our world makes them.

No, preventing the reign of the universal fatso is that small contingent of petit- and haute-bourgeois complexion, for whom the body must be made a memento of a more innocent time when dull routine was still yoked to exertion. Now that the product of our labors no longer requires our exertion, exertion in our labors need no longer yield a product. Exercise becomes an end in itself.

Too sexy for their shirts: the forerunner of today's concept of fitness.

Which is perhaps why exercise has become infinitely duller, consuming time and effort without increasing individual or social utility. Alone and absorbed in our iPods, we bounce on ellipticals and pump iron, dissipating calories once considered precious in a metabolic potlatch aimed at accruing a peculiar sort of aesthetic social capital. Flailing away on contraptions that wouldn’t exist if work still required our bodies, we gather this capital not in gaining, but in losing — saddlebags, love handles, man boobs.

Worse than the seeming superfluity of it all is the fact that most exercise these days, divorced as it is from rendering products from resources, traps the exerciser in one more dreary modality of consumerism. The exertion, done for its own sake, invariably needs outfits and equipment to optimize the experience. The exerciser thus exists simply to put the items she’s purchased through their paces. She becomes a cyborg of neoprene, nylon and liquid crystal as she brings apparel and devices to their full technical glory. Runners are how Nikes realize themselves.

In these times of commodified individuals with their commodified habits (lifestyle) and habiti (fitness; cult of the body), one must mount an enormous amount of critical resistance simply in order to preserve the humanity she feels herself to have. Otherwise, her humanity will be dragged from him like a prisoner from the Bastille by the hedonistic Jacobin hordes surrounding her. Many today would have us believe that human beings are nothing more than sacs of chemicals. If this is indeed the case, the question remains: Why must a sac of chemicals tell itself that it is nothing more than a sac of chemicals? Why must it offer itself this affirmation in order to be at home or at ease with itself. Need a weed tell itself that it is nothing but a weed in order to be at home with its weed-ness? Need a dog tell itself it is nothing but a dog? Such a conviction can only suggest one thing: that the will to transcendence, native to every sentient human (to one degree or another), has turned in on itself, and can only assuage its apparent sense of defeat by finding itself to be nothing more than an anomaly peculiar to a certain type of entity.